MORAL AFFINITY THE TRUE GROUND OF UNITY.

SUNDAY MORNING, DECEMBER 6, 1868.

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WHILE he yet talked to the people, behold, his mother and his brethren stood without, desiring to speak with him. Then one said unto him, Behold, thy mother and thy brethren stand without, desiring to speak with thee. But he answered and said unto him that told him, Who is my mother? and who are my brethren? And he stretched forth his hand toward his disciples, and said, Behold my mother and my brethren! For whosoever shall do the will of my Father which is in heaven, the same is my brother, and sister, and mother."- MATT. xii. 46–50.

Ir has been said that this speech of our Lord was rude, and even harsh and unfeeling. I am at a loss to imagine how any one could form such a judgment. If I had been called to select a passage from our Saviour's teaching as an instance of his peculiar manner, and of the beauty and wisdom of that manner, I know of none better to be taken than this.

For some reason his mother and his brethren urgently wished. to speak to him-so urgently that word was sent to him while yet he was in full discourse with the people. Such a message to a common person would suggest domestic matters; as, "Why would my mother speak with me?" "What hath she to say?" or, "Hath aught befallen any one?" But these are the lower ranges of thought. The household, and the sacred names in it, suggest fitly household life and household care. Yet these are the lower suggestions. They belong to the indispensable yet mechanical elements of secular affairs.

Our Saviour's mind always glanced upward from every topic-not downward. The largest earthly relations, but still more frequently the spiritual and heavenly suggestions, arising from every topic brought before him, were invariably suggested to him. He did not act like a man of the earth, earthy, but rather like one who came

LESSON: Rev. xxi. HYMNS (Plymouth Collection): 1259, 1233, 1257.

down from heaven, and who had a wider horizon, and saw things in their superior relationships.

In the remarkable case in hand, our Lord, when told that his mother and his brethren stood waiting to speak with him, felt instantly that there were affinities and relationships far higher and wider than those constituted by the earthly necessities of family life. As it is the mother's and the father's heart that makes the family dear; as it is the love of brother and sister that constitutes true friendship, and not mere contiguity, or the bare juxtaposition of family life, so the Master, unfolding this idea, and employing the incident as a theme, developed the sublime doctrine of moral unity—of universal relationship founded upon moral affinities.

It was as if he had said, "Truly, she is my mother, and they are my brethren; but in the higher life, not alone the one who reared me, but every one who is like her, is mine. Not alone the gentler companions of my childhood are brothers and sisters, but all who have pure and large hearts. For all true relationship springs from moral states, and not from the mechanical arrangements of society. God is the one Father, and all men become intimately related to each other in proportion as they are intimately related to God."

Is this a rude reply, which divests the relationships of life of their limitations and of their feebleness, and exalts them into the spiritual sphere, and there gives to them the purity, the dignity, and the liberty of the divine nature? This was a compliment to true glory. The name Mother suggested to him God-and what praise is there higher than that? Her affection for her son opened to his thought the universal affection, which, in the final but yet hidden kingdom of God, exists, and shall exist, between all pure natures.

It is worth our while to observe that there is indicated, and, if you search narrowly, clearly to be discerned, a certain order and tendency of alliances. Men are coming together by various attractions, and are being united to each other by a great many different ties. They are not accidental, nor heterogeneous. They have a definite order, and proceed from a lower to a higher. Men coalesce into relationships, first, mechanically, on account of the organic institutions of society. The family brings us one to another. We can not choose who shall be our companions in the cradle. We wake up and find them already there. And whether they be suitable or not, they are our brothers; they are our sisters; they are our parents; they are our near connections. And so the family, by a mere mechanical arrangement, as it were, by a physical causation, determines, first, the relationships which men shall sustain to each other. Out of these speedily begin also to develop other ones:

The school comes next, and we begin to be interested, and to be in

affinities one with another, by the sports, if not by the intellectual sympathies, which are developed in the school. And these constitute, sometimes, life-long bonds.

Then comes the state, and its political subdivisions, and we are united to each other because we are of one nation and of one flag. This is a latent feeling often. I had lived all my life long without being conscious of what my feeling toward my native country was, until I stood in a foreign land, and heard it debated, whether it deserved to live. Then I knew that there was not a man under the Stars and Stripes that was not as dear to me as my brother, and for whom I would not have fought to the uttermost. I knew it then. I scarcely had thought about it before. And this alliance, this affinity, this coalescence of man with man, is determined largely by the accident, if I may so say, by the providence of his birth, in village, in town, in state, in nation, and stock or race.

But there are other alliances playing within these. Men are drawn to each other by self-interest-and strange company trains together. Only let self-interest be strong and various, and men can endure almost any thing. Men can endure men and conduct that their consciences never would endure and that their love never would endure. Only let it be a man's selfish interest to be patient, to hold his peace, to consort with most undesired associates; only let it steadily tend to build him up in respects in which his selfishness longs to be built up, and he acts accordingly. Let it advance his ambition, and ambition does not care for its bed-fellows. Let it make a man rich, and for the sake of money men will tolerate almost any thing among men. lower nature has a charity, a patience, a forbearance, that their higher Their nature has not. Because when their interests are not involved, and you ask them, for Christ's sake, and for conscience' sake, and for benevolence' sake, and for charity's sake, and for love's sake, to be patient with men, they will not for a moment. their self-interest demands it that they are able to bear the burden of It is only when the depravity of their fellow-men. And so I bless God. Why? Because men are selfish? No; but because God has a providential government over this world, which makes men act right even from low motives. How much more they ought to act from high ones!

This patience and forbearance between men from self-interest is right. The wrong is, that it is not more gloriously developed, and more resplendently exhibited by the higher feelings. And so it has been said that justice itself starts from self-interest, and that almost all the higher tendencies of human nature begin in these lower instincts.

Similarities of taste also draw men together by elective affinities. Men who find themselves open to the same pleasure and coincident

of the same thought, who help each other, who reflect, as it were, each other's natures, who complement each other; men between whose souls there are echoes constantly passing, whose thoughts rebound from those of each other, and whose feelings perpetually rebound; men of like tastes-they own relationship. And sometimes it is stronger than natural affinities-as it ought to be. It is higher than they are.

Then comes interchange of kindly services. How strongly that binds man to man, I need not say. How we love those that stood us in stead in our trouble! How, when our turn comes, and we stand by their side in the dark hour, who once stood by ours, are we conscious that, in these noble interchanges of disinterested service, there is springing up a manly affection that is far stronger than the natural sentiment of affection!

Then, by general good-will or benevolence, we are united to men. Kind natures run toward kind natures. Charitable natures call forth charitable natures. Good men are lovers of good men.

Still higher than this comes personal affection, discriminating affection-not indiscriminate affection or good-will, but that affection which is founded upon the recognition of positive excellences. This stands still higher.

When you go one step further than this, and all this life is united together with the life of other men, disinterestedly, in common suf ferings and common achievements for a noble cause; when hope, and faith, and endurance, and self-denial, in companionship, strive for the alleviation of sin and of suffering, and men train together, doing the works of God, then you have reached the highest ground of affinity and of coalescence in this world.

You will observe that now we begin to recognize men as related to us in our lowest animal conditions, and that these relationships go on multiplying, and that there is a definite order by which they rise from mere mechanical relationships, up through affectional relationships, through self-interest, through relationships of taste and understanding, into relationships of the higher moral feelings. The truth is, that those relationships which begin lowest down, although they are apt to be the most intense, and to produce the most vivid impressions and sensations, are inferior; and that those relationships which seem to us for the most part shadowy, and often even romantic and imaginary, are, after all, the most vital, the most manly. They are those states toward which we are growing, and into which we develop, if we are developing into a true civilization and religion.

With every true man these affinities of his higher nature should control all lower and instrumental ones. We are to stand nearer and stronger together-stronger in our attachments one to another

by those things which we have in common with God, than by those
things which we have in common with the animals. And yet, in point
of fact, it is the reverse.
We love those that are born of the same

mother, that sleep in the same cradle, that feed at the same table. Still following the line of physical development, we love those that work as we work, that contribute to the common stock, that are related to us, or that, as we say, are "blood kin." We ought to love them; but we ought to grow out of that love into a higher one. Even though we begin in this lower sphere, as all animals do, it is not a fact that, because we are born under the same roof, and because we have this social juxtaposition, we find each other out, as a matter of course, in our higher and nobler parts. If I may so say, the clasping of early life should take on very soon the form of taste, and of affection, and of benevolence, and of moral feeling; and at last love should take on the highest form of religious feeling.

This, it seems to me, is the legitimate deduction from the passage which we have selected, and which we have expounded.

"Then one said unto him, Behold, thy mother and thy brethren stand without, desiring to speak with thee. But he said unto him that told him, Who is my mother? and who are my brethren ?”

"Who is my mother ?" To be sure, she that bore him; but can not a man have more than one mother? In the lower sense, No; in the higher sense, Yes. "Who are my brethren?" They that slept upon the same maternal bosom that I slept upon? Only in the lower relationship are they brethren. But may there not be a higher and a spiritual relationship, which shall make those who are like me, or like me in the respects in which I deserve to be loved, my brethren

too?

"And he stretched forth his hand toward the disciples "-who represent all men who are aspiring and attempting to live a higher and a godly life-" and said, Behold my mother and my brethren!"

There were twelve men, and he called them mother. There is no sex known in the higher sphere. That is accidental and earthy, and it passes away. These higher relationships not only are higher in respect to intensity and purity, but they dispossess the mechanical necessities of the lower relationships. All who, like these twelve brethren that follow my footsteps, are seeking day by day to do the will of God-they are my mother.

"For whosoever shall do the will of my Father which is in heaven, the same is my brother, and sister, and mother."

There is not a person on earth, earnestly and sincerely endeavoring to find out the will of God, and to perform that will, to whom Christ is not manifested as mother, as father, as brother as sister, as the most intimate friend.